Hazardous Encounters

At 24, Steve had a long record of success. Unusually enterprising, he was already making money at the age of 13 by importing and selling Japanese toys at Christmas time. He had done well in college and also in business, so well that he used to spend $300 for his suits and could quit work and go to California with $25,000 in ready money. While there, he decided to experiment with encounter groups at Esalen and soon became absorbed in the movement full time. He went into the "millionaires' group" where they had parties and burned $50 bills as part of their therapy. He later became a group leader, built a cabin in the mountains near by, took occasional acid trips, and wrote in his diary: "This is such a weird place . . Somehow I'm still not dead, although for the first time in my life I've begun to look carefully at the possibility." On Feb. 9, 1971, in a craft shop on the grounds at Esalen, Steve picked up a Hawes .357 Magnum revolver and killed himself.

Steve's story, recounted in a new book, The Encounter Game (Stein & Day; $7.95), is one piece of the evidence assembled by Manhattan Psychotherapist Bruce Maliver to make a case against the human potentials movement (TIME, Nov. 9, 1970). Maliver, who has degrees in psychology from Yeshiva University, blames Steve's death largely on his experiences at Esalen, although he admits that the man had problems and took drugs before he went there. Arrested for possession of marijuana and chemicals for LSD, for example, Steve had spent a few days in jail.

Whether or not it is fair to blame Steve's suicide (and the six others that Maliver mentions) on encounter groups, Maliver makes a reasonably strong case that the movement often promotes "the artificial, the shoddy and the absurd" as if they were significant and holds out the "false promise of psychological nirvana." Considerable support for Maliver's view (framed in more temperate language) is to be found in Encounter Groups: First Facts (Basic Books; $15), written for professional readers by University of Chicago Psychologist Morton Lieberman, Stanford University Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom and State University of New York Psychologist Matthew Miles. After systematically evaluating more than a dozen varieties of encounter groups, the three scientists found that a third of the participants gained nothing, while another third reaped "negative outcomes" and in some cases sustained "significant psychological injury."

However, Lieberman, Yalom and Miles also report that a third of their subjects showed "short-run positive changes." Although the researchers believe that encounter groups sometimes offer "momentary relief from alienation," they warn that the groups can be dangerous and that their "danger is not counterbalanced by high gain."

Maliver himself admits that "there seem to be clear-cut positive effects for some participants." But he believes that "the encounter house" is badly in need of a cleanup. Although the growth centers where encounter flourishes often insist that their aim is not to treat emotional disturbances but to enrich life for normal men and women, the groups in fact attract many people in need of therapy. Nevertheless, there is rarely any screening to keep out those most likely to be harmed when buried problems surface.

Even more dangerous is the fact that most leaders, Maliver says, are either amateurs whose only "training" was their own participation in groups, or "marginally trained" professionals such as psychologists who dropped out of graduate school. These leaders are ill-equipped to deal with serious emotional problems, take no responsibility for what they do, and are unwilling to let trained investigators take a close look at their results. Their methods, moreover, tend to be either useless absurdities or destructive assaults on the often fragile psyches of encounter enthusiasts--or victims.

Among the offending leaders, Maliver cites Manhattan's Dr. Daniel Casriel, a physician who, says Maliver, admits that he was dismissed from his analytic institute and appears to make "as much as $12,000 each week." "Name any psychiatric symptom," Maliver writes, "and Casriel will tell you how long it will take him to eradicate it." According to Maliver, Casriel promises patients "an accelerated re-education of your 'ABCs' A = affect-feelings-emotions. B = behavior-act-actions. C = cognition-attitudes-thoughts."

His approach, similar to Arthur Janov's "primal scream" therapy, is to teach members of his groups "to grab hold of a feeling--any feeling--and express it in a series of yells, screams and moans which increase in volume to almost unbearable intensity." Overwrought, the patient is then soothed by the rest of his group, as well as by Casriel, if he is present, or by one of the ex-patients who run most of Casriel's groups. No effort is made to understand the emotions that have so painfully --and dangerously--been aroused.

Casriel's technique is one version of what Maliver calls "psychological karate," an approach that precipitously strips away emotional defenses "in the naive view that by recognizing their pathological sides, people will automatically become healthy." In fact, without the careful preparatory steps taken in professional psychotherapy, such recognition can cause serious psychological damage. The effect is similar to that in encounter groups where participants are psychologically assaulted under the guise of "openness" or "honesty."

Summing up his own view of encounter, Maliver cites a position paper issued by the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Its key statement: "A much lower incidence of adverse side effects produced by a drug would cause its immediate withdrawal from the marketplace by federal authorities."

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